


Libertango

by royaletea



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Inception AU, M/M, guns and explosions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2742989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/royaletea/pseuds/royaletea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aomine and Kagami’s dance between the smell of gunpowder and blood-stained suits, just below the layer of consciousness.</p><p>In which two dream mercenaries fall for each other, hard and fast, like a pair of bullets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Libertango

**Author's Note:**

> Roy here! This story takes place in Inception verse, with a bunch of headcanons of my own added for plot purposes. No Inception characters will be making an appearance, but familiarity with dream sharing technology might be good 8D;; Kagami is an extractor, who steals the secrets in dreams, and Aomine is a forger, who can transform into different people in dreams.

_Yokohama, 2001._

Kagami arrives in Japan with nothing but the sharp, tailored suit he’s wearing and a frayed thousand-yen bill in his leather wallet.

He spends it on an overpriced bowl of udon at the airport, with oily noodles and lukewarm soup. Unsatisfied, he roams about the neighborhood and reaches for his pocket, before remembering that he doesn’t have any cigarettes on him.

He’s always travelled light, out of habit more than anything, but it’s a risky move on his part, because jobs can always go wrong and it’s always safe to have backup plans in case things go pear-shaped.

Which, it always does when he can least afford it.

The job itself is nothing complicated—just the usual corporate espionage, in which a company CEO commissions him to delve into the dream of a rival CEO to find dirt on him, with a fat paycheck attached to the contract—or so he thought.

Kagami can feel something _off_ about the dream, as he circles along the cobbled streets designed after the target’s—Seijuuro’s—hometown, Kyoto, knuckles white around the gun cocked and ready to fire.

He feels the click of the gun before he hears it, and dodges out of the way, instincts screaming at him to move, and the bullet barely grazes his shoulder before hitting the projection of a middle-aged woman behind him.

She screams and falls into a heap of a bloody mess on the street, drawing the attention of other projections bustling about.

_What the—_

Kagami’s eyes widen as he twists around to see a six-foot tall blonde bombshell in a skimpy dress blowing away the gun smoke with pink-glossed lips.

“Aww, poop,” she shrugs, and sends him a wink, taking aim again with the bazooka. “I’ll get you this time, I guess. Stay still, darlin’.”

Kagami’s thoughts race miles per hour, because that can’t be a projection—projections don’t attack each other—but she’s not part of his team either, so who the hell—

Ah, fuck.

Kagami _runs_.

-

Colloquially called the double-cross job, it’s the last thing any dream mercenary wants to be involved in. It happens when a client gets impatient, or desperate, and hires not one team of dream mercenaries but _two_ , in order to obtain the same information from the target.

It’s sometimes a glitch in the communication between the clients, but other times purposeful, to foster competition and efficiency or some other crap.

(Damned if they know anything about how extraction of a secret works, because sending assassins in the same dream and watching sparks fly is _not_ the way to get your prize faster.)

But then again, in the kinds of shady jobs they’re neck-deep into, all their lives are on the line, should they not be the one to come out on top.

-

Speeding between the crowd mingling in the Kyoto streets, Kagami lets his microphone sputter into life.

“Shit, this is a double-cross,” he relays to the architect—Koganei—breaths short and uneven as he sprints across the dream city, cutting into the traffic with a wave of his arm. “We’re not prepared for this!”

He peers over his shoulder to make sure that the blonde isn’t chasing him anymore, and lets out a sigh of relief when he can’t find her, and slows to a stop near a coffee shop.

“It’s all right,” Koganei’s voice wavers in his ear. “We can still pull this off. Just stick to the plan. If we just figure out how many of them there are—”

“Hell if I know,” Kagami spits, and runs his fingers in his short hair. “Shit, just meet me and Mitobe at the bank rooftop, all right? We need another plan.”  

With that, he turns off his mic, and dashes along the brick bridge atop of a train track. From here, it's a short trip to the bank, just a few left turns and then a straight line along the department store. Scanning the street signs to check the address, he slows to a stop at the bank, slamming the door open.

Any chance of stealth is gone, so might as well be flashy.

Two guns cocked on either side of him, Kagami heads straight to the rooftop, bypassing the elevator to race up the stairs, two steps at a time, and find Mitobe and Koganei waiting for him.

“How much do they know of our plan?” Koganei asks with a grimace.

“Enough, if they were confident enough to let us know that they’re here. We need to get the target into the station as soon as possible—” Kagami stops, and glances at Mitobe, who is nervously tapping his fingers against his microphone with a funny look on his face, and Kagami feels a niggling whisper in the back of his head screaming that something is wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

(He can’t really tell what it is, but he’s grown to know when to trust his instincts, and so.)

Wait.

Kagami and Mitobe’s eyes meet, and they freeze for a second, realization dawning upon both—

They jump for their guns, and Kagami is just a split second faster in taking aim straight into Mitobe’s heart and missing by an inch, hitting him in the arm instead.

Mitobe’s gun flies out of his hand and clatters against the floor, as Mitobe lets out a scream. His form wavers, flickering for a second before moulding into a dark-skinned, blue-eyed man, someone decidedly _not_ Mitobe—

“Ha, you’re good,” the man says with a smirk, breathing heavy as his knuckles grow white against the growing red stain on his arm. “I shouldn’t have played with you.”

“You were sending a morse code message right in front of me,” Kagami growls, and crushes the man’s microphone into smithereens under his shoes, and cocks the gun against the man’s forehead. “Don’t mess with me.”

The man’s lips curl up, in an amused smile, and Kagami feels queasy knots settle into his stomach. “You can’t beat me,” he says, and flings himself off the building, letting himself plummet to the streets below.

Kagami swears colorfully.

-

Five minute in a dream is an hour in the outside world, and those few precious minutes he wasted swearing at the dark-skinned man and shooting himself in the temple, too—fuck, he sucks at math, but he wasted a lot of precious minutes in the outside word.

By the time he wakes up, bleary-eyed and squinting, the other team is already long gone, with the information they needed.

Slamming his fist onto the wall, he notices that there’s a sticky note attached to his shoulder.

_you can’t beat me, but thanks for the help, darlin’ ;)_

At the bottom of the sticky note is a pink-glossed lip stain, and Kagami swears as he realizes he’s been thoroughly defeated.

 


End file.
